EXTRA! EXTRA! FEARFULLY FEARLESS 2004 OSCAR PREDICTIONS!

Well, it's all over but the beer and pizza. Our annual Oscar soiree is being catered this year by the good folks at Two Guys from Italy, located on Verdugo Road directly underneath the 134 Freeway in a pleasant industri-dential area of Glendale. The Vons just around the corner from our house is kindly supplying (for a nominal fee, of course) the Miller Genuine Draft, and I'll finally be popping the cap (as onetime Oscar nominee Mickey Rooney used to say in those Rainier Beer ads in the mid '70s) on a very nice Czech lager given to me as a Christmas present by my good friend Cruzbomb. Oh, yeah, there'll also be enough vino on hand to sate even the likes of Paul Giamatti (if only it weren't merlot!), courtesy of a friend who shall remain nameless for fear of her being prosecuted under those strict new Burbank ordinances forbidding transfer of mass quantities of red wine to Italians. Oscar Night is a special night in our house, second only to Christmas and Opening Day of Baseball Season (note caps), one of the only nights of the year that the big TV in the living room is on in the evening and the voices of either Vin Scully or Elmo cannot be heard emanating from it, and the attendees of the Howard Street Oscar Affair 2004 are sure to afford all the reverence and solemnity that the evening demands. That is, unless Kate Winslet comes down the red carpet Sunday afternoon looking anywhere near as devastatingly gorgeous as Shohreh Aghdashloo did last year. If that happens, all bets are off and the house is likely to turn into a howling den of iniquity real fast.

Before any of that has a chance of happening, let me see if I can sabotage my odds at winning the office pool and run down my sage picks (guesses-- Ed.) for this year's Oscar winners. The act of taking guesses in public is a little different than laying down your three bucks and checking off categories in private. Now everybody will be able to return to this page as Oscar Sunday night gives way to Monday morning and be able to track exactly why I've never won that damned pool in the 44 years I've been putting it together. But the hubris of having a public forum is superseding all claims of modesty this year, and so I'll just jump right in and try to sound like I know what I'm talking about. Where's that Czech lager? All of the sudden I feel like drinking...

Best Picture: Sideways could sneak in here if the awards end up as evenly distributed among many different films this year as they were all lumped into one Peter Jackson-sized basket last year. But essentially I see this as a two-picture race. The Aviator has the scale of a typical Best Picture winner, but I'm betting that the interest, and the controversy, surrounding Million Dollar Baby has peaked at exactly the right time for voters to send this one across the finish line by a thin margin. Winner: Million Dollar Baby

Best Actor: With all due respect to Clint Eastwood (my personal pick), Don Cheadle, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio and, hell, even Paul Giamatti, the only way Foxx doesn't win this is if the Academy screwed up and printed the voters ballots with the name "Redd" instead of "Jamie." Winner: Jamie Foxx

Best Actress: All the talk is about the big Bening-Swank rematch, but pool voters shouldn't discount the possibility of Imelda Staunton's support being a mite stronger than the relative visibility of Vera Drake on the box-office charts might suggest. That said, unless the actors branch decides to honor Bening for playing one of their own, I predict Swank makes it two for two. Winner: Hilary Swank

Best Supporting Actress: The actress categories are definitely more difficult to call than their male counterparts. Again we have a two-person race. As good as they were, Linney, Okonedo and Portman can just be glad to have been invited. The race between Cate Blanchett and Virginia Madsen is, for my money, the toughest to call in any category this year, and I salute in advance anyone who gets it right. But I can't just bail out like that, can I? Winner (nervous shudder): Cate Blanchett

Best Supporting Actor: Thomas Haden Church is getting a lot of good press, and some would love to believe that Jamie Foxx can pull off something that no one has ever done and win in both acting categories in the same year. But if this isn't Morgan Freeman's year, after three previous losses, then, hey, maybe Clint Eastwood's chances at that Best Actor statue are better than I thought. Winner: Morgan Freeman

Best Director: I don't see a split between Picture and Director coming this year, which means that I think Martin Scorsese is gonna go home empty-handed again. But at least he didn't participate in all the groveling for the award this time around that he indulged in trying to win for Gangs of New York (and The Aviator is a far better movie too). Winner: Clint Eastwood

Best Adapted Screenplay: In 1991, the one major award for which Unforgiven was nominated that it did not win was Best Original Screenplay. Prepare to see the same fate befall Paul Haggis and his script for Million Dollar Baby. Winner: Sideways

Best Original Screenplay: Those who love The Aviator (and I count myself among them) tend to be most reserved about its script. I think the strongest contender might just be Brad Bird's wonderful screenplay for The Incredibles... if it weren't for that pesky Charlie Kaufman and his co-nominated cohorts in narrative contortion. Winner: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Best Animated Feature: The winner had damn well better be The Incredibles!

Best Art Direction/Set Design: I'd love to see A Very Long Engagement sneak in here, but I think we're going to see the Scorsese picture come on strong in the technical categories. Winner: The Aviator

Best Cinematography: I didn't see The Phantom of the Opera (did anyone?). But Caleb Deschanel's work in The Passion of the Christ is, for the man who shot The Black Stallion and The Right Stuff, typically brilliant; Bruno Delbonnel's sublimely impassioned textures in A Very Long Engagement are indeed stunning; Zhao Xiaoding's electrifying images in House of Flying Daggers are so sensuous and dreamlike that I can't shake them, nor do I want to; and Robert Richardson's masterly and magnificent approximation of three-strip Technicolor to inform the different periods of The Aviator are thrilling beyond compare. Had the Academy made room for the digital video dreamscape of Collateral, courtesy of Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron, this would have been the most spectacular collection of nominees this category had ever seen. But hey, four out of five is still spectacular. Winner: The Aviator

Best Costume Design: Ray could slip in here, maybe, but I'm thinking a near-sweep of sorts in the technical categories, and I'm sticking to it. Winner: The Aviator

Best Film Editing: The winner of this award usually matches up with the Best Picture winner (you'll have to ask someone smarter than me-- maybe George Pennachio-- exactly why), so I'm gonna stick my neck out and let the tides of history carry me on this one, even though discounting Thelma Schoonmaker (and my genius Aviator technical awards sweep theory) may be a mistake. Winner: Million Dollar Baby

Best Makeup: I can't believe they nominated The Passion of the Christ in this category, and I really can't believe they'd actually give the Oscar for Best Makeup to it. I just can't. Winner: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Best Original Score: I'm feeling nostalgic. Winner: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (John Williams, silly!)

Best Original Song: Shouldn't there be years when they just shut this category down? Winner: "Accidentally in Love" from Shrek 2

Best Sound Editing: The winner had damn well better be The Incredibles!

Best Sound Mixing: The winner had damn well better be The Incredibles... but it won't be. Winner: The Aviator

Best Visual Effects: Harry Potter has my heart, but the heart and the vote don't always occupy the same check box. Winner: Spider-Man 2

Best Foreign Language Film: Downfall

Best Documentary Feature: Born Into Brothels

Best Documentary Short Subject: Sister Rose's Passion

Best Animated Short Film: Birthday Boy

Best Live-Action Short Film: Wasp

Okay, so there's Million Dollar Baby taking five big ones, The Aviator manhandling the technical categories (and the Supporting Actress category) for five wins, the screenplay categories reserved for honoring deserving films with less heft, overall nominations-wise, and some trinkets left over for The Incredibles, Lemony Snicket, Spider-Man 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and, yes, even Shrek 2. This is the Academy pendulum swinging back in the direction of spreading the wealth after last year's Return of the King-fest. So, after such decisive and compelling choices in each category as I've presented here, it should be a piece of cake to now go and fill out my Oscar Pool ballot, right? Not so fast. I always end up taking a chance or two that derail my hopes of actually winning, so why should this year be any different? I'll probably end up talking myself into picking Annette Bening or Million Dollar Baby for screenplay, and then watching my $3.00 go right down the pipe. Oh, well, we do a lot of irrational things in our private, fearful moments, don't we? That's what's fun about this little blogsite exercise for me-- everything's just a little less private now, and when I bomb this year it'll be clear that I no longer deserve to be known as Dennis. These picks had better be perfect down the line, otherwise my name is PRESS HERE

I LIKED HIM IN "JERSEY GIRL," BUT...

...was anyone else heartened to read this compelling headline for this bit of hard-hitting news in this morning's Internet Movie Database news column?:

AFFLECK TAKES MASSIVE PAY CUT

The story reports that Ben Affleck has waived his usual multi-million dollar fee to play actor George Reeves, the Superman star who was mysteriously shot dead in Beverly Hills in 1959, in a movie entitled Truth, Justice And The American Way. Affleck is so convinced, says the item, that the fact-based drama is the perfect project for him that he's taken a massive pay cut - and will only earn $2.8 million.

If we're to take "multi" as meaning more than one, or even more than two (Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary supports both meanings), then I think I'm safe in saying the status of Affleck's fee as a multi-million dollar one, while perhaps severely diminished, remains intact. How he expects to to survive on "only" $2.8 million, on the other hand, is a question I think only he can adequately answer.

O BLOGBOY, WHERE ART THOU?

Good Friends of the Blogosphere,

It's hard for me to get used to the idea that there might be an increasing audience out there checking in on what's happening with this site, but it seems to be, on some still small scale, true. So I thought I'd let you know, in case anyone was wondering why nothing new has been posted in three days, that a house full of colds (kids and adults) and a bunch of deadlines at work that all seemed to gather around one day have made posting new material a difficult proposition.

That said, there's much new stuff on the way. I finally caught up with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and expect to have some things to say about that film, and the whole Wes Anderson phenomenon, in the next few days. My local Blockbuster has, within the last week, stocked some very interesting titles, and what with their new "no late fees" policy (there are strings attached, of course, but they're fairly easily clipped) I expect to be able to see and post about some titles that are likely to get very quizzical looks from the clerk behind the counter. Some of the titles I saw on their shelves last weekend include the documentary My Architect, as well as Godard's In Praise of Love, the acclaimed Japanese film All About Lily Chou-Chou and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a film found on many top-ten lists at the end of last year and one I hope to see and write about this weekend. And I also recently caught an old Clifton Webb-Gloria Grahame saga of British wartime intrigue called The Man Who Never Was, which will definitely be worth some comment.

That's not to even mention the fact that the Oscars are just around the corner (Sunday evening). I have a couple of items to share on that monumental event as well.

And a little thing called Spring Training starts next week too. Baseball season is back!

So, to those who have been checking in and not finding much new over the last few days, I thank you very much for your continued interest. There should be some new items up and ready in the next 24 hours or so.

SAYING GOOD-BYE TO TWO VERY DIFFERENT REFUGEES OF THE '60s

Hunter S. Thompson is gone today. However he might have romanticized it, and whatever his ultimate reasons were, in his own particularly astringent way he probably thought all along that spraying his brains out with the firearm of his choice would be the way to go, at least for him. The isolation of the Woody Creek compound, good for retreat and for the production of Gonzo Journalism, finally, as the demons began shouting louder, provided the stage for the ultimate getaway. Like Loxjet, I first read Hell's Angels at a wildly inappropriate age-- I think I was around eight or nine when I squirreled a copy out of my aunt's book club-derived library-- and it scared the hell out of me, which is exactly what I think I wanted it to do. I wouldn't return to Thompson until my late college years, and during the Reagan '80s I devoured the entire twisted Thompson bibliography, perhaps as a way to escape the crushing reality of that most depressing of decades, but also because I felt transported by the grandiose hallucinatory historical vision and fecund imaginative connections produced by reading Hell's Angels (again), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, The Great Shark Hunt, Generation of Swine and, of course, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas virtually back-to-back. As Loxjet suggested, now that Thompson is gone all we're left with is a long string of imitators and watered-down pretenders to the throne, and watered-down is even worse when it comes to Thompson (as his later work, cut by increasing paranoia and incoherence, certainly proved) than it is when speaking of a tumbler of his beloved grain alcohol. Writing in The New York Times in 1973, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt worried Thompson might someday "lapse into good taste":

"That would be a shame, for while he doesn't see America as Grandma Moses depicted it, or the way they painted it for us in civics class, he does in his own mad way betray a profound democratic concern for the polity," he wrote. "And in its own mad way, it's damned refreshing."

That lapse certainly never happened. While the trajectory of his career and life may leave a bitter aftertaste, for those who loved his writing, in its peaks and its valleys, there is a freakish kind of solace from revisiting his contributions to the continuing surgery being done on "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character." R.I.P. seems a strangely inappropriate sentiment on this day. Better to think of Dr. Thompson hitting the highway on the other side and letting 'er rip.


And goodbye as well to another icon of the '60s who was never able, as Thompson was, to burst out and make her mark on the subsequent decades of her life. Sandra Dee was Gidget (1959) long before anyone ever heard of Sally Field, and it's for that movie she'll be most fondly remembered. But as a kid I was always partial to her two appearances as country girl Tammy Tyree, the role Debbie Reynolds originated in Tammy and the Bachelor (1957). Dee first played the role in Tammy, Tell Me True (1961) and then again in Tammy and the Doctor (1963). Her coming-of-age adventures were favorite rainy Sunday afternoon TV fare, and while no one, not even me, would mistake them as anything but corny fluff, they were well served by her unpretentious charm and precocious energy. Her split from husband Bobby Darin in 1967 got her stuck with the label "divorcee," not exactly a scarlet "A," but close enough for a Hollywood mired (at least publicly) in outdated moralistic attitudes toward actors who would dare to be open about such personal matters. The last thing I ever saw her in was her damsel-in-distress turn in the American International Pictures H.P. Lovecraft adaptation of The Dunwich Horror (1970), frightening enough to a ten-year-old but certainly not worthy of her warm and easygoing presence. Dee was diagnosed with throat cancer and kidney failure in 2000 and died of complications from kidney disease at the age of 62. Those who knew her well will mourn the passing of a friend who likely treasured her early Hollywood experiences and her life beyond them. For those of us who knew her only as Gidget and Tammy, her relatively low profile over the past 30 years will make it easy to preserve that bubbly starlet persona as our remaining fond mems of Sandra Dee.

HEFFALUMPS: THE HIDDEN THREAT

Emma, Nonie and I braved the downpour this morning, enjoyed a cheap and delicious breakfast at our new Sunday morning haunt, Hamburger Central, at the corner of California and Central in beautiful downtown Glendale, and took in an 11:10 a.m. screening of the season's most anticipated feature (at least by two-thirds of our party), Pooh's Heffalump Movie. We smuggled in popcorn, juice, and (for Dad) a couple of cans of Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi, and settled in just as the previews began, Emma (the big girl) in a seat of her own, Nonie turning my crossed leg into a literal lap of luxury from which she happily munched and laughed for 68 straight minutes. These two make my dreams come true every time I take them to the movies. They're so attentive, excited and joyful about the whole experience, and today's matinee was no exception-- Nonie lost herself in delighted laughter over one triumphant moment near the end, hiccupping ha-has well past the point where the rest of the kid-packed auditorium had gotten over it all and returned to relative silence. Did she ever get the looks, mostly from amused parents, to which she remained blissfully oblivious, happily lost in the Hundred-Acre Wood.

Pooh's Heffalump Movie is better than Piglet's Big Movie, and a damn sight better than The Tigger Movie, both visually and as storytelling-- not once did I feel the seductive pull of the Sandman luring me away from consciousness toward a hopefully Pooh-less place. In fact, it was a much more engaging movie than I would have ever expected. And it was amusing to see the conventions of sophisticated suspense softened and put to relatively clever use as the identity of the horrific Heffalump is teased at and finally revealed-- Emma sat glued to her seat and reacted to each rustling bush and barely glimpsed shadow as if she were her old Dad waiting for the elevator doors to open and allow "Bobbie" to take his/her slow-motion hacks at an unsuspecting Angie Dickinson.

The movie takes the cues for its visual palette from the lavender hue of the adorable Heffalump himself, and it almost goes too far in this direction in the first 10 minutes-- Pooh's nightgown is lavender, all the wood seen in this forest-- planks and trees-- seem to lean away from a natural brown toward a lavender pastel, and even Tigger's nose seems to have a lavender tinge. I found myself overcome with the urge to grab the remote and try to tweak the image slightly. Things do tend to balance out back to the traditional and familiar color schemes of the Disney-fied Pooh after a while. But by then it's too late. The movie has become about something more than just an overzealous hue. The makers of Pooh's Heffalump Movie have tipped their hand, practically daring cultural watchdogs like Focus on the Family's James Dobson and other card-carrying members of what the think tank Political Research Associates have termed "the theocratic right" to come down on this relatively thoughtful children's movie like the vice squad shutting down a pajama party at Tinky Winky's purple pad.

You see, Pooh's Heffalump Movie is the story of a group of friends forced to confront their preconceptions and prejudices regarding a much-speculated-upon unseen creature and in doing so realize that said monstrous beast is not monstrous at all but instead, in all the ways that count, very much like themselves. The heffalump turns out to be a very plush-toy-ready version of an elephant, but Pooh and company have plenty of strange ideas about what he/she/it looks like before meeting he/she//it that underline the creature's status as a metaphor for social and ethnic minority-- Tigger's insistence that the heffalump sports a tail with vicious spikes on it sounds very much like the claims of those who once perpetuated (and still do) the myth of Jews as horned devils. In this way the movie can be seen as a general plea for tolerance, a kid-friendly lesson in the pitfalls of bigotry.

But that preference for lavender, whether intentional or not, ought to set a lot of bells ringing if anyone is paying attention in Dobson's office. After all, as I wrote in a comment on Loxjet's Wailing and Gnashing blog this afternoon, we've been witness to a little lesson recently about what the theocratic right, and Dobson in particular, really seems to think of tolerance. Whether it's Arthur's pal Buster traveling around the world espousing tolerance and understanding of those who are different than we are on the PBS Kids show Postcards from Buster, or Spongebob Squarepants living his off-kilter life in a pineapple under the sea, Dobson and like-minded social and spiritual tyrants just want you to know that whenever the word or the concept of "tolerance" shows up in this context, it's a secular humanist buzzword that, loosely translated, means acceptance of gays and, naturally, the gay lifestyle.

And when Pooh's Heffalump Movie, like that violet-hued purse-wielder Tinky Winky, traffics in a color as coded as lavender and starts talking about how we should try to understand one another and not succumb to our prejudices and fears, why, that's practically the dogma of the decadent laid out in easy-to-swallow morsels for our young and innocent to swallow, and be swallowed by. And that's why these shows and films are bad, bad, bad. Not only are gays and the gay lifestyle to be refuted as ungodly, so too now must the idea of anyone else treating them with love and compassion, like any other human being, for fear of being seen as tacitly promoting a heretical and damnable sexual orientation. It's enough to make one's head spin in delicious, yet ultimately depressing anticipation of Dobson discovering and decoding Heffalump's hidden, evil agenda.

Myself, I'm kinda hoping Emma and Nonie swallow those particular morsels. I'll leave Dobson to suss out to the eternal consequences while we get ready to see Robots, which undoubtedly has some foreboding subtext that I'll have to consider before allowing my little impressionables to see it. Perhaps there'll be the wanton mixing of 30-weight and 40-weight amongst the film's mechanical characters in some sleazy oil bar about which to fret and gnash my teeth. And that densely constructed set design on display in the Robots trailer ought to be fertile soil ready for plowing by the repressed loons who have tired of ranting about the phallic columns of Neptune's palace in the ad art for The Little Mermaid. What fun to have a whole new cityscape potentially crammed with hidden sexual imagery to decode, rail against and, of course, fantasize about! I'll bet this is why Dobson thinks God made the movies.

WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING?

Thanks to faithful reader and excellent friend Andy for reminding me of something that should have been painfully obvious-- there's just no excuse for not finding a place for Claudia Cardinale in the divinely inspired chain linking classic beauty Sophia Loren to stunning newcomer Eva Mendes. I mean, not only did I make observation regarding her ultimate loveliness that I stated in the previous post, but she's also immortalized in the masthead of this very blog site, for crying out loud. Along with his reminder, Andy was kind enough to link me to two superb shots of Ms. Cardinale at the peak of her popularity in the mid '60s, the most electrifying of which is posted below. He also confirms the celestial nature of this triple (now quadruple) feature of movie goddesses with this spot-on observation that he left in the comments section last night:

"Ya know, the Great Set Designer, or Big Blue Dodger in the Sky, or the world's most Positive Thinker, or whatever you wanna call him, he's just messin' with us, letting our scientists think they can clone something. Clearly, he's been doing it all along."

I couldn't have said it better, nor did I.

Please feel free to place Claudia right between Sophia and Raquel on this timeline of tempestuous and awe-inspiring cinematic beauty. And Claudia, if you'd forgive me my oversight, why, I might even sit through Fitzcarraldo again.


What the hell was I thinking?

IS IT JUST MY IMAGINATION...

If I might be permitted a not-exactly-prurient diversion on a rainy Saturday night...

I just saw the cover of the latest issue of Elle magazine while I was buying some laundry detergent this afternoon, and suddenly this evolutionary line of great beauties of the movies formed in my express-lane consciousness. With apologies to Claudia Cardinale, who I once listed as the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in a movie, based on her appearance in Once Upon A Time in the West, follow along with me for a moment for a brief visual presentation, if you would...

Is it so hard to imagine the Great Production Designer drawing a line from this lovely woman...


Sophia Loren in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow